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Wednesday, Apr 02, 2008
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Top prize for French man

A. Srivathsan

— PHOTO: AP

Jean Nouvel, a file photo.

CHENNAI: Jean Nouvel, the French architect, has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2008, for his “courageous pursuit, exuberance and insatiable urge for creative experimentation.”

The prize, instituted by the Hyatt Foundation, is annually awarded to a living architect for his or her lifetime achievement. It carries a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. It is considered to be the Nobel Prize equivalent for architecture.

It was instituted in 1979. Since then 32 architects, mostly from the developed countries, have won it. Jean Nouvel is the second French architect to receive it. The 62-year-old is based in Paris and has been practising for more than 30 years. He has a long list of projects to his credit. The more popular ones among them are the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, the Loyn Opera House, and the Louvre Museum in Dubai on which work is in progress.

Nouvel’s designs are known to be less familiar-looking and novel. His experimental approach came to world attention after he completed the Arab World Institute. The skin of this building is fashioned like an Islamic decorative pattern, but beneath it is a functioning mechanical device that controls the intensity of light entering the building. Like the aperture of a camera, parts of the skin dilate and shrink in response to the sunlight level.

To Nouvel, architecture “reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references.” He added: “It is about what is happening now and what we are capable of doing today.”

The jury acknowledges Nouvel as an architect who has pushed the discourse and praxis of architecture to new limits. However, as one critic remarked, not all of Novell’s designs are easy to love. In one instance, of the Guggenheim Museum in Rio de Janeiro, the design met with strong protests for different reasons. Eventually the $250- million project was dropped.

The citation notes that Novell has expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture regardless of the varying degrees of success he has met with in his pursuit.

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